Multitude

by Swanson, Peter Joseph

  “So what. I want to look nice for Eleven Jane.”

  Venus said, “In the city we dress like we didn’t just weave something with a few sticks. I want you to make a good impression at the union meeting so let’s find something urban and smart. We don’t want to look like amateurs as we plot war. We want to look like we’re dangerous, competent, and mean it. So while you’re at it, during the meeting sit up straight.”

  “I can sit up straight wearing this. It’s very comfortable.”

  Venus looked him up and down. “We can’t talk business with you looking like the Christmas shepherd in the Bible pageant.”

  “I… I don’t remember what that is.”

  Venus said, “Once a year we’ll remind you of that one, although the birth of the sun god doesn’t mean as much in outer space, without France’s seasons.” She started to sing, “Il est né, le divin Enfant” as she held a dress up to herself and brushed off some cobwebs. Then she stopped singing, to say, “And while we’re poking around here who knows what I’ll find for me.”

  “How do you feel about not being cloned yet?” he asked, looking back and forth at them both.

  Lady Hatchet pulled some earrings off a metal cubistic tree made to display hundreds of them. “That? Phhh! I’m trying not to think about it today, except I’m always thinking about how to make them do it tomorrow.” She gestured to her ears as she asked Venus, “Do these make me look like a shrewd femme fatale?”

  Venus nodded to Lady Hatchet as she said to Thorn, “I used to wake up with hope and think this could be the day but then by midday I’d realize it wasn’t going to happen that day so I’d resolve that I’d have to wait for the next day, and hope all over again.”

  Lady Hatchet said, “A whole lifetime of hoping and waiting for something that didn’t happen is very very very exhausting.”

  “Ditto,” Venus agreed as she pulled a glossy pair of black fish-scaled pants off a shelf and shook them out. “This is about the only thing here that’s damn long enough.”

  Lady Hatchet pinched up her face. “His muscles will never fit in that. His body has, well, shape to it, dear. He has shape.”

  Venus sighed. “They don’t have much here to choose from for cop clones.”

  Lady Hatchet grabbed the pants and tugged on the scales of the fabric. “It’ll stretch.”

  Venus took them back and held them up. “But don’t you think it all looks a bit too last year? Waaay last year.”

  Lady Hatchet took them and looked them over for herself again. “Try it on.” She handed them over to Thorn.

  Venus took them from him and pulled the legs apart. “Oh no. He’ll be squished.”

  Lady Hatchet grabbed them and pulled on the pants. “We’ll see how far it stretches.”

  “I’ll tear it.” Thorn frowned.

  “Maybe at the knees or something,” Lady Hatchet said. “But we build things better than what you were used to on Earth.”

  He shed his robe, took the pants, squeezed into them, and yelped. “It hurts.”

  “Good,” Lady Hatchet said. “That means you’ve been civilized. As long as it all holds until after the meeting.”

  Venus looked back at him, from having been looking away. “There are changing rooms around here somewhere but I guess there’s nobody around here but us so it doesn’t matter.”

  He walked back and forth in front of a dusty mirror staring at himself in amazement. “My head!” He ran his hand over the thick stubbly texture. “It’s growing hair! I look like I’m turning into a werewolf!”

  Venus asked, “Do you think we look like werewolves?”

  “Sorta.”

  She added, “And Eleven Jane? She has the loveliest long hair of anybody.”

  He pulled at his crotch. “She looks wild.”

  Lady Hatchet asked Venus, “Do you think those pants make him look more professional?”

  Venus asked, “What does a professional lab clone really look like when dressed for a big war meeting?”

  Lady Hatchet shrugged. “Maybe the body should all be accentuated, shouldn’t it? They should think he’s a wild bull grizzly bear walrus ready to kill everybody. Instead of what you always look like, a knackered old tart.”

  He asked, “Do I look too wild with this hair?”

  Venus said to him, “It just makes you look more human. So maybe, yes.”

  He looked at them both angrily. “You’re just making fun of me. Having fun at my expense. Having fun with my clone body!”

  Lady Hatchet smirked. “Of course we are. Who do you take us for? We’re two bored old women. If we won’t get a revolution then we can at least take somebody new shopping for pants.”

  Venus flashed red with embarrassment. “Try anything on you want. I just thought those were the only damn pants long enough. Here. Wear this vest. Blue goes with black. Everything goes with black. Cover up all you want. Just no pretty colors. We want to look serious for the meeting.”

  He looked in the mirror again at his head. “I don’t have to shave, anymore. I want hair. People like Eleven Jane like men with hair, don’t they? That’s the way to look?”

  “Whatever,” Venus said. “Here, put this vest on. We’ve just got to cover a little more of you up to make you polite for a meeting. You can run around in anything you want afterwards. Wear a blackguard kilt for all I care.”

  “Let’s go.” Lady Hatchet turned to the waiting car. “Damn, shopping is exhausting. Especially with a clone.”

  Thorn wondered if he hadn’t gotten into heaven, before, because he had no hair. He wondered if having a lot of hair was one of the secrets. He asked, “How do you make your hair grow faster?”

  Lady Hatchet glanced back at him. “It grows no matter what so stop thinking about yourself so much.” She turned to Venus. “I’m glad I found some earrings to make me look more femme fatale. It should help me get respect at the union meeting.”

  Thorn knew his hair would grow out into a big lush mane. Eleven Jane’s hair was the most beautiful, too. He wondered if that was the secret—that he would enter heaven with her because they were the most beautiful couple. He filled with hope.

  * *

  They drove on and on through a maze only a car could remember and stopped at a hall outside an expansive food court complex. They walked through a door and saw that a dozen other select union members were already waiting for them. Most were at a far table on the other side of the court.

  “Nice tight pants,” Mack greeted them at the door, under a huge arbor covered in spindly dead vines. “I can see the ladies have taken you shopping.”

  “And taken my ego.”

  Mack replied, “That’s what women are for.”

  Lady Hatchet glowered. “We look dangerous.”

  Mack turned to Venus. “I hope this is a good place for a secret meeting. I hope we aren’t bothered way over here.”

  Venus nodded assuredly. “This is the very back of the city cave. Far far away. Any farther away and we’re outside. Unless you wanted to meet in a damn freezer.”

  Mack looked around. “Yes, we should be far enough from the union hall so that they shouldn’t trip over us accidentally.”

  “I haven’t been to this cafeteria gallery in years,” Lady Hatchet commented, looking around. “Nobody comes here this far anymore, do they?”

  Thorn walked ahead of them into the court, peeking into the glass bubbles of the nearest vending machine. He blew aside dust. It was empty. He grumbled and looked about the room. Pink trees grew under chandeliers set into a high ceiling of many layers of clear glass pyramids. Empty gazebos dotted a floor made uneven with wide pits and platforms. A blue river cut into the room at one corner and three glass bridges linked it to an island. He crossed one of the fanciful bridges to look into another modish vending machine. It was empty. Thorn looked at tall fishtank pictures of fetuses that were hanging along one wall between jutting silver frames. “What’s this?” he asked.

  “These babies are from fish and cats
and horses and humans and birds.” Venus pointed them out. “It used to be fun to try to tell them apart.”

  “They all look the same.” Thorn stepped close.

  “The damn dots haven’t differentiated fins from toes from claws to hooves to wings.”

  “And fingers and toes,” Thorn reminded them. “One of those up there is human, right? It’ll decide to have fingers and then decided to decide to develop a brain so big and complicated it decides it wants to be special and act like an arrogant fool.”

  “Oh of course. That one. The damn jaw and ear bones aren’t there yet. Fish gills.”

  Thorn grabbed his own solid jaw and remembered water sifting through his lips but his air coming from water sifting through his neck. He felt sad and didn’t know why he’d have that feeling at this time. “I had gills.”

  “We all did,” Venus said. “You just kept yours longer. The rest of us lost them right away in the womb, to be sensible.”

  Thorn pondered, “I wonder why it was so comfortable in the fishtank.”

  Venus said, “People got lucky enough once to separate themselves from the monkey branch. They did it by hitting up the seashore. They spent most of their day in the water, atrophying their appendixes, tails and fur, eating seafood protein that gorged and expanded the brain. They did that, similar to the dogs who became dolphins by hunting farther and farther from shore, eating the same. People still like water. People still feel at home at the seashore.” She paused and her eyes quickly clouded over with sadness. “That’s why we’re so damn sentimental and like the lake, here, so much, I guess. It’s why they decided to put one in a damn asteroid even though its safeguards might possibly fail in a malfunction, in a gravity emergency. They did it to make us feel cozy. When you’re contented, surrounded by tradition so deep it’s even inside your genes, your mind turns off.”

  “Will you hurry up, dammit!” a union man yelled over at them from a table. “Let’s start today! Let’s start before all the others in the union find out we’re meeting without them.”

  Mack hurried over and sat with them, behind a rostrum. “Yes, that would look very bad for me.”

  Another man said, “If that’s the clone you said was the clone, I’m outta here.”

  Mack asked, “Why?”

  “He ain’t special. I see tens of him a day and feed his pieces to the deli.”

  Venus winked at Thorn, “What he means is that you’re a classic model.”

  Thorn was not comforted.

  The man looked hard in Thorn’s eyes, and scowled. “Another one.” He got up and left.

  Mack nervously began the meeting. “We want to bargain with the robber scientists and we want to throw them brand new surprises. New surprises that our class war has never seen before. Wicked ones.”

  A man asked, “Like do what?”

  Mack grinned, looked at them all, and turned red. “Any ideas?”

  “Oh give it up,” an old man said. “It’s a losing bet. They have far too much real power.”

  An old lady with pink hair said, “We could turn this shitty clone into germ warfare.”

  Venus looked at her horribly.

  “Well, why not?”

  Venus said, “Because it’s damn stupid.”

  “It could backfire,” Mack told the women. “We don’t want to let whatever’s in his body, out. The robots and pathogenic dots swimming in his blood may be able to live in most any conditions. Why do you think they don’t experiment on things like that on Earth anymore? Do you remember how many huge biological tragedies they had on Earth before they shoved it all up here?”

  “Let’s shove it back at them,” a man said.

  Mack asked, “And how? How are you going to take what’s in the clone’s blood and inject it into them?”

  Lady Hatchet slapped the table, losing her femme fatale pose. “Let’s use our heads for once and not just their rusted guide books.”

  Venus nodded. “Their guide books can go to Mars.” They nodded to each other.

  Mack thumped the table. “These experiments are probably unnecessary, anyway. It was all done on earth on computer models enough times over to prove it could work. Bringing it into the lab on this asteroid was just a stupid expense and waste of time while we all grow old and die.”

  Lady Hatchet narrowed her eyes. “I’ll bet they’re really hiding something and this is all illegal.”

  “You think so?” Venus asked her. “Really?”

  Lady Hatchet shrugged and then reached back to gently pat the roll of her hair. “Phhh!” She frowned.

  “You can’t prove that,” Mack said.

  Venus said, “Maybe there isn’t any damn plague in that clone’s blood. Maybe that was just a ruse. Maybe they lied about that too.”

  “Corporations don’t lie,” a woman said. “They can’t. They’re way too big and visible to lie. They couldn’t get away with it for too long if they tried.”

  “Well, they do,” Mack argued. “There’s no way we can come up with conclusive blood tests. There’s no way we can figure out all there is to test for. Who knows what they did to this clone. Who knows what a stray one means to them.”

  The old woman with pink hair said, “Maybe his damn plague is airborne. Maybe just breathing right along side with him will rust our lungs to shit.”

  “No,” Mack said. “Anything airborne from anything in this rock is supposed to sound so many alarms.”

  The lady winked at him. “You trust that?”

  The old man said, “Have him cough in the red grill so we can test it.”

  “It won’t matter,” Mack said. “If he doesn’t have anything airborne, the alarm won’t sound off.”

  The old woman with pink hair said, “I just want to test the rusted alarms. I don’t trust the shitty doctors. I don’t trust them or the alarms or anything in this cheap shit hole.”

  “They lie to us,” a woman said.

  “We have to trust them when it comes to safety,” another woman insisted. “If you can’t trust corporations to be truthful about our safety then what is there?”

  “Trust them? Trust them?” Lady Hatchet laughed like a loon.

  The old man insisted, “Regardless of the condition of his blood, they’ll want him back. The more they want him back the more of a bargaining chip he is to us.”

  “Remember when unions used to be able to go on strike?” Lady Hatchet said. “That was before the robots all but took over. Robots certainly took away many strikes.”

  A young woman warned them, “Maybe they’ll just come out and burn him up and we won’t be able to do anything about it but get the hell out of the way.”

  Lady Hatchet said, “Phhh! Then at least we’ll see the damn bastards. We haven’t seen their damn faces in years, now. They’ve hidden from us for how long? Did anybody even actually see their faces during the last negotiations?”

  Mack rubbed his chin. “We’ll call up the robber scientists and tell them we have one of their clones. A real live alpha clone. A billy boy cop clone that walks. That should make them sweat. They might worry we have their security figured out. Then we could say we’re going to slip Thorn back to Subco Gibeah and really ruin their entire illusion there. We could threaten to slip him back and forth every four years and mess them up for a long while. After a few decades, just having him show up old would ruin their four years, in one minute. They’ll be afraid that we can totally mess up their game as fast as they can start up a new one. Now they’ll take our demands seriously if we just threaten to pollute the research projects again and again so they can’t ever hope to start a new one.”

  Venus applauded. “Mack, you just came up with our plan. You’ll be a marvelous new leader.”

  Lady Hatchet frowned. “Didn’t I pretty much say that just before Madam Wintermirror died? Give credit where credit is due.”

  Mack ignored her. “That is a good plan, isn’t it? We’ll just threaten to send Thorn into Subco Gibeah every time they send in a new batch of clones
. As an old cop he’ll ruin it all with giving everybody fatal wild thoughts.”

  Thorn frowned. “The other cops all have guns.”

  A man said, “Just walk in as a hologram. Why don’t any of us just walk in as a hologram and have a look around in here?”

  Venus told him, “Holograms don’t work over there. They only work over here in our city. I can see why they don’t want us visiting the clones that way. It would totally mess everything up over there for them to see us like that looking at them.”

  Lady Hatchet added, “The holograms only go where there are projectors put up for them.”

  Mack winked at Thorn. “We’ll just threaten them and see where that gets us. They don’t know how dumb we really are. Most of life is bluffing, isn’t it, anyway? It is for men anyway. That’s just natural.” He turned to Lady Hatchet. “Call them up and tell them we’ve got them in a vice.”

  Lady Hatchet said, “I already tried to call them first thing when I first met Thorn.” She held up her pen. “It just played Bach too fast.” She waved it off superciliously.

  Venus made a sour face. “Damn I hate them.”

  “So, I’m a hostage, I know,” Thorn said. “So what are my rights? Do I have any at all?”

  They looked at each other and finally shrugged. Lady Hatchet cleared her throat and suggested, “You can do whatever you want as long as you help us screw with the damn robber scientists so they don’t get their way… so we get our way.”

  “I can do what I want? Good, then I want Chrysalis Joy back. I know that the one I knew is dead but there’s more of him around, right? He’s supposed to be the same difference. Right? We can get to know each other all over again, I don’t mind that.”

  “What?” Lady Hatchet asked, suddenly looking confused. “Damn what?”

  “Who’s he and who cares?” the old man asked.

  “Another alpha?” the young woman also asked.

  Lady Hatchet reminded him, “That clone is certainly dead as last year’s cracker crumbs.”

  “But there’s lots of him,” Venus reminded her.

  Thorn said to Venus, “I don’t know about lots. A whole group of him was iced at once, from what I could see.”